But then, so is the decidedly earthbound action on the floor. Eight women in short skirts and kneepads roller-skate around a grimy track, sweating, spent, hawking Burma Shave for the sponsors and digging for a golden 2,000 bucks in prize money. Unlike Busby Berkeley's drill teams of sequined beauties, these women are messy and three-dimensional. They come with names like Rosie, Babs, and Flowers. They've fallen from desperate blue-collar backgrounds into even more desperate economic times, and the roller derby is their big ticket out.
The scene's split personality is the ace in writer-director Nikki Appino's stylish hand. Although tethered to a plotline based on the tragic--and aged--Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Rain City Rollers, the latest House of Dames production, borrows its make-up and its metaphors from more modern sources. This original musical is set in 1936 at the halfway point of the Great Depression, when the prosperity of the '20s was a distant memory and economic recovery was a distant dream. To combat the kind of aimless despair of the period, new forms of escapist entertainment elbowed their way into popular culture. One of these was the big movie musical. Another was the marathon, or "derby." In the mid-'30s, Americans could go straight from the bread line to the ticket line to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers whirl around on gleaming ballroom floors and the decks of opulent ocean liners in films like Swing Time and Shall We Dance.
Others danced themselves--for prize money. On the heels of the pie-eating, flagpole-sitting, record-breaking crazes of the 1920s came the popular six-day bike races and dance marathons of the 1930s. Prizes awarded to winning couples in the dance marathons were set between $1,000 and $5,000--a fortune to the mostly unemployed, working-class participants. These endurance contests also offered contestants temporary food and shelter in addition to a chance at fortune and fame. Some competitors danced (or dragged themselves) around the floor for weeks at a time until they collapsed. A couple of contestants actually died. Audiences in need of escape from their own exhaustion showed up in droves to witness these pageants of exhaustion. In many ways, the marathons mirrored the Depression-era experience; their popularity was a sure thing.
Leo Seltzer liked those odds. Half visionary, half huckster, the former film publicist saw an opportunity to line his pockets by combining the biking and roller-skating crazes with the dance derby trend, and came up with roller derby. The goal of Seltzer's contest was to complete approximately 60,000 laps--the distance between New York and L.A.--around a banked oval track. During its opening week in 1935, Leo Seltzer's Transcontinental Roller Derby drew 20,000 spectators. Seltzer was soon traveling the country with his portable track, charging 10 to 25 cents for admission.
It wasn't until he hooked up with sportswriter Damon Runyon (author of Guys and Dolls), however, did roller derby hit it big. Runyon helped Seltzer reshape the derby, changing the rules to allow for elbowing, slamming, pummeling, and other types of violence on the track. To enhance the drama, emcees and various forms of entertainment were added, including musical acts and staged fights. For female participants in particular, the roller derby became a sanctioned place to drop the sweetness 'n' light, and let off some real steam. Crowds loved it.
The aggressive theatricality of the roller derby tradition is an obvious attraction for Nikki Appino, who doesn't shy away from noisy, large-scale spectacle. And although she's set Rain City Rollers in 1936, her timing couldn't be better. Just last year, in the interests of cash and retro kitsch, Leo Seltzer's son Jerry brought back the roller derby in the form of TNN's Roller Jam. The derby's a lot faster now, but the same old-school mix of sex and freewheeling female aggression draws skaters and audiences. "In other sports, you can't grab someone around the throat," noted pro "jammer" Lindsey Francis. "Here, you can. It's like an emotional outlet." This kind of material is ripe for a big musical production, but one with more grit than, say, Broadway's pallid attempt years ago with The Rink. Appino faced challenges in anchoring the energy and drama of the derby with the hungry times in which it was born. At the same time, she needed to tell a story, and landed on the Orpheus and Eurydice tale as a useful foundation for structuring a drama in which love competes with fate in a life-or-death contest.
With the aid of dramaturg Mame Hunt and the Rain City Rollers ensemble, Appino conducted extensive research on the derby and Depression-era pop culture, and went to work creating a new version of the Transcontinental Roller Derby. "I cast a group of performers often with an idea/theme only," Nikki told me. "The development process is about shaping the themes and the emerging story to the group of performers in front of me. After time and workshops, other needs occur (ringer skaters, singers, [choreographer Wade Madsen]) ...by the organic process of development." Through this months-long workshop process involving research, improvisation, and detailed character work, the Rain City Rollers have built a distinctly American show over some classic themes: cursed love, fatal intervention, redemption via tragedy, triumph over adversity.
The most exciting thing about Rain City Rollers is that--despite this complex mix of influences--the production's success relies utterly on a simple, old-fashioned concept: There's drama in contrasts. For a stylist like Appino, spotting those contrasts and incorporating them into her staging seems almost second nature. Historical characters mix with fictional ones, divine characters with humans. Rain City Rollers bears other Appino trademarks, including a feminist undertow and gender-blind casting (Leo Seltzer and Damon Runyon are played by Sara Harlett and Susanna Burney, respectively). The music for the show, composed and written by David Russell with Kevin Joyce, skirts the uptown musical and slides into downtown music hall in the span of a number. And then there's that set. The possibilities for a fascinating double-play of rough-edged, work- ing-class entertainment and cheerful, champagne-soaked movie spectacle are all there: I'm banking on the Rollers to pull it off.
